Publications

The Linux Kernel, CDDL and Related Issues

This document explains licensing issues as they relate to the Linux Kernel and CDDL-licensed code.

Read or download:

SFLC's Guide to GPL Compliance
2nd Edition

How to read, understand, and comply with the
provisions of the GNU GPL family of free software
licenses, including a discussion of the relation
of governance to compliance, and practical advice
about responding to inquiries or compliance
complaints from copyright holders.

Read or download:

SFLC's Legal Issues Primer

The Software Freedom Law Center publishes
a primer for free, libre, and open
source software developers seeking to understand the
legal implications of community development and
distribution of software.

Other Publications

Distributions of free software involve sharing of computer program, which is mostly governed by copyright law. Other legal rights, involving trademark, patent, trade dress protection, protection against unfair competition, and other legal doctrines are potentially involved as well. When hundreds or thousands of programs and associated files containing documentation or configuration data combined into “packages” are then aggregated into “distributions” such as Debian, Fedora, RHEL or Ubuntu, the significance of these related rights increases, and the complexity of their interaction does as well.

Our practice at SFLC involves advising clients on the interaction of these rights and the difficulties that arise from their overlapping nature especially as they travel between non-commercial and commercial parties.

We publish this document explaining the interaction of these peripheral rights for the benefit of the larger community in furtherance of our mission of spreading awareness about Free and Open Source Software.

How to read, understand, and comply with the provisions of the GNU GPL family of free software licenses, including a discussion of the relation of governance to compliance, and practical advice about responding to inquiries or compliance complaints from copyright holders.

This document explains the purpose of license and copyright notices, the legal requirements behind them, and the current best practices for maintaining this information in a free software projects source distribution.

The Software Freedom Law Center publishes a primer for free, libre, and open source software developers seeking to understand the legal implications of community development and distribution of software.

SFLC’s amicus brief before the Supreme Court in Samsung Electronics v. Apple Inc. arguing that design patents are unconstitutional and that the total profits damages rule is therefore constitutionally infirm.

SFLC’s amicus brief before the Supreme Court in Google, Inc. v. Oracle America. SFLC and FSF take the position that the decision below is wrong, but that certiorari should not be granted for three reasons: (1) the decision of the Federal Circuit merely mispredicts what the Ninth Circuit would do if it had been the Court resolving Oracle’s appeal from the District Court’s finding that the application program interface declarations at issue are non-copyrightable; (2) the decision rests on narrow factual grounds; and (3) there is no public interest in continuing to adjudicate this dispute because Google can now and could have used all material at issue under the terms of the GNU GPL v2.

SFLC’s amicus brief before the Supreme Court in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank arguing that the “machine or transformation” inquiry employed by the Court in Bilski v. Kappos is the correct, and exclusive, bright line test for patent eligibility of computer-implemented inventions.